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Standing at the edge of the gallery on Saturday, watching people gather around Helix at the American Glass Now exhibition, I felt no need to introduce myself or explain what they were seeing. Ten years after creating Helix, I was not being asked to present, interpret or prove anything. I could stand back and allow the work to speak. The experience was surreal—and quietly beautiful. I shared more about that experience in a LinkedIn post earlier this week. As I continue to sit with the moment, I am embracing how far its meaning extends beyond her frame. Around the same period that I designed and constructed Helix, I was developing the work that became the paper, “Living Life in the Meantime”: An Arts-Based Coaching Model Offering an Alternative Method of Managing Personal and Professional Change. The original paper was written more than a decade ago and published in 2018. At the time, I understood the window and the paper as two distinct creations. One belonged to my artistic practice. A visual expression of words in motion. The other belonged to my research, coaching and organizational change work. A literary expression in reflection. What I could not yet perceive was the relationship between them. Helix began with a question—and an answer that became a pattern. Its curves suggest movement, continuity and evolution. Each piece of glass holds its individual character while contributing to something larger than itself. Looking back, I can now hear the question at the heart of Living Life in the Meantime®: How do we live within change while it is still unfolding? The model offered a personalized map to help people manage the effects and emotions of personal and professional change, and find new ways of looking at challenging situations. That inquiry has since continued evolving within my broader organizational change work. One creation embodied the movement. The other gave it language. In writing the paper, I was no longer waiting for an invitation into a conversation that could accommodate the full breadth of my experience. I was beginning to create my own seat at the table. In developing the window, I was giving visual form to something I did not yet have the language to fully explain. Today, conversations about arts in health, arts in medicine, social prescribing and arts in prescribing are opening new possibilities for how creativity can support individual and collective wellbeing. A paper written more than ten years ago is asking to be further explored within this emerging landscape. Not because it predicted the future or created the field, but because its original inquiry is opening questions that are becoming increasingly relevant: What role might arts-based coaching play in helping people navigate the uncertain spaces between what was and what is still becoming? How might health and wellness coaches contribute to the broader arts-and-health ecosystem? What becomes possible when creativity is not treated as an addition to wellbeing, but as one of the ways we understand, express and transform our experience? In the paper, I was identifying and developing arts-based coaching and deliberately putting the “A” in STEAM—not by adding art as decoration or enrichment, but by recognizing creativity as a way of knowing, processing and navigating the human experience of change. This was long before I encountered the language of arts in prescribing or the current momentum surrounding the role of creativity in health and wellbeing. These are not new questions for me. What is new is my ability to recognize their reach. As the work has continued to evolve, several golden threads have become clearer: Change cannot simply be delivered to people. It must be experienced with them. People support what they help shape. Autonomy creates the conditions for transformation to become sustainable. Creativity helps us see, feel and understand what conventional language alone may not be able to hold. Perhaps the artist, author, coach, researcher and organizational change leader within me were never pursuing separate paths. Perhaps they were shaping one body of work before I possessed the language—or the confidence—to name it. The architecture was forming before I had the perspective—or perhaps the readiness—to perceive it. I believed I was creating a window and writing a paper. I could not yet see that I was constructing a blueprint. This Letter is a portal into that blueprint and the questions it continues to open: The evolution of Living Life in the Meantime®. The role of arts-based coaching in emerging systems of health and wellbeing. What it means to create safer spaces and more human experiences of change—and whom I am becoming through the work. The language I could not yet see was never missing. It was taking shape in the dark. There is more to say about Helix and the place she is beginning to hold within the work I am currently evolving. Some meanings need time before they are ready to be revealed. This Letter is a threshold. I am not creating an entirely new path. I am learning to recognize the one my work has been laying all along, and beginning to walk it home. Earlier today, a new moon passed between Earth and the sun, creating a solar eclipse that was partially visible here in New Jersey. Overnight, the Perseids will leave trails of light across the moonless sky. Darkness. Transition. Illumination. An eclipse does not extinguish the light. It temporarily changes what we are able to see. That feels especially meaningful now. What was once unseen is moving into view, and the work I began more than a decade ago is continuing to reveal what it is becoming, and whom I am becoming within it. Have you ever known something through experience before you possessed the words to explain it? Have you ever felt yourself moving toward an idea before you could see where it belonged, or whether the world was ready to receive it? Perhaps something within you is taking shape in the dark, waiting for the language—and the light—to meet it. With Peace, Love and Light, Yvette—🌚🌞💫
Yvette Ramos-Volz, MS, NBC-HWC
Founder & Chief Creative Officer | Human Experience Strategist Linked Site Title. If something in this letter met you where you are, you are welcome to learn more about The Glass Room and the spaces I create for reflection, creativity, and conscious connection.
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